


These Gentle Wolves

by metonomia



Category: Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonomia/pseuds/metonomia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which a girl goes into the woods, returns, and goes back again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Gentle Wolves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ladymercury_10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladymercury_10/gifts).



> The title comes from this Charles Perrault quote, explicitly detailing the moral at the end of his version of Red Riding Hood: "From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!"
> 
> Thank you thank you to my beta!

She remembers the wolf was near the village.  The huntsman stopped by the inn to give Mother a brace of rabbits — and to get his ale, and to look at Red as she moved in and out of the main room as quickly as possible — and said he was taking the dogs, Mister Barrows the blacksmith, and the smith’s assistant out into the forest the next day.  That next night he was back, and when he came in Red was sitting at reception.  
  
“I’ll get Mother,” she said, jumping up, but he put an arm out to block her, swinging a grimy sack up onto the desk.  It wriggled and whined, and Red stepped back, alarmed, meeting the huntsman’s eyes for the first time since he started stopping by regularly.  
  
“We couldn’t get the bitch, but we found her nest,” he said, untying the sack. “Here, Rosie, want a pet?”  The pup he pulled out was milky-eyed and fuzz all over, and when she took it from him it yawned and snapped weakly at her fingers, and she fell in love.  She nursed it on milk mixed with beefstock while the hunstman told her about the hunt, the new tracks they found near the butcher’s shop, and how Silas the smith’s boy nearly put out his eye on his own spear when they found the den.    
  
“Hold his gob shut when he does that,” he told her when the pup mouthed at her hand.  “Teach him early or he’ll never be but wild.”  She gripped the pup’s muzzle as he said, but she tickled its ears and newly full stomach, and breathed in its baby smell, and swaddled it in a kitchen towel as the huntsman leaned on the bar and watched her.  
  
Mother didn’t let her keep it, of course, and when she asked the huntsman where he took it, he confessed to drowning the pup.  She swallowed the howling cry that welled up inside, and smiled at him when he offered to teach her woodcraft.  She learned to track prey large and small, to avoid predators, to set snares and leave no trace of herself.  They tracked the mother-wolf through the summer and fall, but Red only saw her when the huntsman was gone, and every time she did, she knew the wolf was hunting them, too, following the smell of her babies and their death.  
  
They met, finally, in her grandmother’s cabin, where Red jumped, and Grandma shushed her alarmed cries, and pulled a thorn from the wolf’s paw.  For a long moment everything was yellow eyes and twitching ears and hackles up, and a sudden cold sweat. The wolf snarled softly, deep in her throat, and Red crouched on the dirt-tracked floor, and showed her empty hands, and held her breath.   
  
“This is Ylva,” her grandmother said.  “I think you and she have needed to know each other for a long time now, dear.”  
  
After that, as often as Red could dodge the huntsman, Ylva found her in the woods, and they went to the cabin, and Grandma poured tea and translated. Red began to think to bring the bones from Sunday roast.  Ylva crunched into them as Red nibbled Grandma’s scones, and Red watched the wolf lap the marrow up past her curving, slavering teeth, and she imagined what those teeth would feel like on her leg. She wished through all the autumn that she had teeth so strong as that.   
  
When the huntsman kissed her under a dogwood tree in the first snowfall she understood that this was the price set for his teaching of her, for his kindness to her mother, for the shock she was giving the village, out in the woods alone with a man. It was not a price she was willing to pay.  
  
He found her nose-to-nose with the Ylva two days later, the wolf standing over the girl where she sat on the sleeping ground to wait.  It was a trick he had not taught her, to call instead of track, to set an offering and wait.  But the wolf, who showed Red how the thing was to be done, knew, and came, and added herself to the lure.  The huntsman should have seen how conspicuous it was, how out of place, and paused — that he had taught her, to see what was out of its place in his world — but he saw the wolf, and the girl, and he lunged.    
  
He was fast, and strong, and even in his shock and fear his muscles knew how to kill a wolf.  He had Ylva around the neck before Red even saw him there, his knife in her side, her chest, and Red growled and flew at him because this was _not_ how it was meant to go.  The surprise of her knocked him back, and the wolf had his throat out in an instant.  She flopped on her uninjured side and licked his blood from her fur, and from Red’s face, and Red put her hands on Ylva’s wounds and cried, at last, as if her tears could do anything.  
  
The wolf is in her, now, in her nose, her mouth, the soles of her feet. Or she is in the wolf, but not her belly like they warn.  Her mind, maybe, or her strong pumping heart. Red looks at herself in the mirror and sees her tail, her claws, the roughening of grey fur.  The wolf sees differently.  
  
“My, what small teeth you have,” Ylva’s voice, her grandmother’s voice, her own voice tells her.  “What soft, tidy ears.  What weak eyes.”  
  
“The better to hide you with, my dear.”  
  
But Ylva doesn’t want to hide anymore.  The shadows of a girl’s eyes and hair and hands are not, in the end, much different from leaves and bushes.  She wants her old bones back, the smell of her sun-rough fur.  She wants to hunt, and not to be hunted.  She wants a litter of pups and no huntsman to steal them away, wants not to have to adopt a human girl to fill her aching heart.    
  
“Come away with me,” she urges Red.  “Take me into the woods, or let me take you.  Give me back to my home.”  
  
The hunstman has long been found, buried, and mourned.  Red’s mother fusses every day over the threat she thinks is still in the woods, and Red is not allowed beyond the village limits.  But she knows there is nothing to fear now, and chokes back Ylva’s snarling indignation and knows that not all that is restless in her is the wolf.  
  
She puts on the red cloak her grandmother made her, and goes out into the wolf-wood.

 


End file.
